Our vision

. . . is
for convenient, computable, credible access to the "Tree of Life"
comprising expert knowledge of phylogeny: the species tree you want, in
ready-to-use form, when you want it.

Approach

We are building a system of loosely coupled
components (for name-reconciliation, tree discovery, pruning, grafting,
scaling, etc) that can be configured flexibly, and plugged into
existing tools or systems (e.g., Mesquite-o-Tastic).

An application is phylotastic to the extent that, in response to a user query S, it supplies expert phylogenetic knowledge of S, in a form useful for research, in a timely manner.

where S is a list of identifiers such as { "Mus musculus", "Homo sapiens", "Pan troglogytes" }. Try it at the Phylotastic web portal (create a list by uploading a doc containing names, scraping names from a web page, or sampling from a named taxon)!

This is an open project. If you want to contribute as a programmer, use-case
expert, or tester, please contact Arlin Stoltzfus (IBBR), Brian O'Meara
(UTK) or Enrico Pontelli (NMSU). Do likewise if your organization
(museum, institute, etc) might benefit from a collaboration to build on
the tools that you see here.